About Me

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

A "Forbidden Places" and "Too High to Die" Interview with Curt Kirkwood, May 16, 2012

Skype to Phone
Interview with Curt Kirkwood

Guitar/Vocals/Songwriter

Meat Puppets

May 16, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

Matt- I turned on Palladia,
and there was Bruce Springsteen on Story
Tellers.It was funny because in our
interviews you often reference Bruce Springsteen as someone you admire, and
here he was.So here’s Bruce and he’s
singing a song and he’s stopping literally word-to-word, line-by-line
explaining the entire line to the audience.I can’t imagine you doing something like that.

Curt- No.I don’t think I’d be able to.I don’t think I have as direct an
approach.And when it comes to that kind
of stuff he is more of a story teller.I’m a cut and paste guy.

M- Anyway, last time we talked about Up on the Sun and now I’m skipping forward to Forbidden Places and Too High
to Die.The reason for that is
because, as a sociologist, I’m interested in structural things and it doesn’t
seem, I mean artistically you guys had lots of changes in those years, but it
doesn’t seem that structurally you did.As
a band not much changed between Up on the
Sun until you get to Forbidden Places
did it?Like the way you did
things?

C- Well, not really.We were
just kind of, not unconsciously moving ahead, but definitely stuff was just
going pretty quick.We were putting out
a record a year, two records in one year there; touring more and more.And then with Forbidden Places, at least the way the record was made, was a huge
difference from the way we had been doing it.

M- How did you end up on London as opposed to some other label that
might have been interested.

C- I had gone around to just about every big label.I was talking to, I think it was Elektra, and
they were sending some people around to look at us.They were a little interested.I mean literally, every big label, and we
were managing ourselves, so doing some foot work there.And then Peter Koepke, who wound-up signing
us to London, was interested.He was at
Atlantic at the time, and he just got interested.He was the only guy that really ever got
beyond sending people to gigs to check us out.And you could tell he was pretty interested.But he was getting ready to get started doing
London U.S. and he was opening the London office over here.He made plans to wait until he did that and
then we could be his first signing.So
he had a personal interest in it.We
were unsigned and lot of our other friends were getting signed, but we couldn’t
really get any attention.We’d been
trying to get signed since probably ’86.Whenever Cris and I went and had a meeting with Gary Gersh.I think he was at Geffen at the time and they
had just put out like that “Sledgehammer” Peter Gabriel song, and signed Gene
Loves Jezebel.He was a nice guy.He said he had all our records and all that
stuff but he couldn’t figure out how he would market the band.I always get a kick out of it because he was
saying how he went and saw Gene Loves Jezebel and they had these twin brothers
fronting the band and they had style.And he said it was easy to see like, “Boom!” sign them.That was a no brainer. But he couldn’t figure out, as much as he
liked us, how he would push the band.So
that was that.So we’d been trying for a
while.It wasn’t the main push.We were still working, but we saw that other
people were getting signed and it just took a while.

M- There was some momentum building.This is all before Nirvana, at least before Nevermind. And as you said,
a number of bands in your cohort start getting signed.Some bands like REM or Red Hot Chili Peppers
or Violent Femmes, they go straight to the majors, but others like Sonic Youth
or Hüsker Dü or Pixies did their time and then went to the majors.So there’s some kind of momentum building
apparently.

C- We were always going up in terms of how many records we were
selling and how popular we were, just a steady slow increase.We were never languishing during any of that
time, but I could definitely see how it’s hard to meet the supply and demand on
the indie label at that time.We weren’t
seeing our records in stores as much as we’d like to and started to see the
difference there.Hüsker Dü got signed
to Warners.That was the first punk band,
like, “Wow, that’s real punk rock!” They
got signed.Chili Peppers were going
along but they definitely had a style and a marketable thing that was easy to
extract from the whole punk rock blur.And REM of course.

M- Replacements are in there.

C- Replacements seemed to be getting the pop band treatment.Jane’s Addiction was another one that was
sort of late nineties, it was like, “Yeah cool! It’s comin’ from the heart of the LA scene.”A lot of it was kind of punk rock.I had done shows with Perry’s band, Psi Com. We could see how this was starting to be
viewed as a viable, commercial thing to the suits at these labels, or the more
money labels anyway.

M- Do you remember a month or a date when you actually signed a
contract and were officially on London?

C- It’s about a year before Forbidden
Places came out.It took a while to
get it out, to make it and get it out.

M- So mid-1990 maybe?

C- Yeah.Monsters was ’89.Yeah.And Koepke actually wanted to get that one, once
we had done it.He wanted SST to make a
deal with him.He started the label
up.He had been an A&R guy at
Atlantic for, like, Pete Townshend and Robert Plant, on their solo stuff.That didn’t work, getting it away from SST,
and getting it that way.So Forbidden Places is ’91, when it came
out.

M- July of ’91 exactly.

C- Yeah. Okay. So that’s actually more like a couple of years after
we tried to get the Monsters thing,
because that would have been Summer of ’89 when that stuff was happening.We tried to make Forbidden Places on our own.The first thing was like, “Of course you guys have to produce it,
because that’s what you’ve been doing.”

M- The label was trying to get you to do it on your own?

C- Yeah.We made some
demos.We did a few different ones.We did “This Day” and a few other songs in
Phoenix the way we had always done them.And they were like, “Nah, it’s not very good.”

And we’re like, “Okay.”

Then they started trying to get producers in
there.We didn’t try out very many.I don’t know how Pete Anderson came up.It was maybe in the offices there or
something.I think he heard that they
were looking for a producer.We had
played with Dwight Yoakam some years earlier and Pete was like, “Yeah.I’ll do it.”He was doing a lot of outside production from Dwight stuff at the time
and was pretty respected.I thought that
was a great idea, because I really liked Dwight and Pete.

M- So, let’s see, you recorded sometime around April of ’91, Forbidden Places comes out in July of
’91.

C- Ah man, they got it out that fast?That could be right.It took a
while until we got started, and then once we did get started we just plunged
in.We were definitely in L.A. for about
a month recording it at Capitol and mixing it at Sound Castle.It was all done right there in Hollywood,
Pete’s calls on all that stuff.I just
let go and watched.I had no idea how
you would spend that kind of a budget.To me it’s I’ll just go in and record it.This, you know, I had to let go and become
more of a cog.It was pretty fun
really.I was definitely in over my head
in terms of how much I scrutinized stuff and compared that to the engineer
there, and Pete’s assistant Dusty, Dusty Wakeman.Between those three guys it was amazing ears
and stuff.It was like being an actor on
a film set with a director.And we were
at Capitol Studios which was somewhat intimidating to go through security.You’re in this amazing studio.Lots of cool people have been in there, right
in the belly of the beast in Hollywood.We still had our little hiding place area.We’d just hang out and let the stuff go on
around us.“Ok, time for guitars,” and
so we’d come out of the hiding place and do some guitar stuff.Pete set up, like, twenty amplifiers, and had
this amazing drum doctor guy come down and bring all kinds of different drums
and what naught.It was pretty
intense.It was a lot of fun for
sure.

M- Were the songs all written and rehearsed before you got
there?

C- Yeah, everything was nailed down totally.That was definitely not the kind of place you
want to be sitting around too much.I
might have done a little bit of tinkering with it but pretty much I think I had
it all.

M- Do they still feel like your songs as he got through with them or
do they feel like more of a collaboration?

C- Pete changed some arrangements.He’d go, “Why don’t you lose one of those verses, or one of those chorus
rounds,” that kind of arrangement stuff that he was suggesting to make it more
pop friendly, the structure, which was cool.He likes things to be quick and I could step back outside my stuff and
see how that’s useful.I had been making
records without anything like that.I
never argued with Pete, though.I just
didn’t know enough.I knew what he was
trying to do so it’s just like, “Okay.Okay.”He could do that kind of editing.It was before Pro Tools but they weren’t
afraid to cut pieces of tape out and do all this and that.It was educational.

M- What other things changed with signing to London?You must have had an advance of some kind,
maybe a touring budget of some kind.Anything like that?

C- Not really.We never did
that.We never took an advance like
that.We always just P.O.ed them for the
expenses and never got our hands on a big bunch of cash.They would give us tour support
occasionally.But that came later.If we were on a big tour then they would give
us enough to fill out the bus budget or something like that.But we never got any bundle of cash, and
never did a publishing advance.

M- Was this your choice?Did
you bring this from your punk rock ideology?

C- Yeah pretty much.They
weren’t looking to hand it out either.It
was just being careful.I’ve had friends
who’ve got those incentive things, went out and spent some of the budget on
cars or whatever.I think those were
usually publishing budgets that people were spending, because you get the
recording budget and you don’t want to spend that on anything.From my understanding, you got the producer
there acting as the treasurer, watching the money.If it goes over the producer has to go into
his own budget to finish it off.So he
gets the recording budget, part of which goes to the producer, and the rest of
it he’s supposed to plan that out.No,
there was definitely no more money involved at that point.Not for our first release.

M- But the recording budget was a lot more than you were used to.

C- Oh yeah, for sure.We
didn’t spend a huge amount on a record until No Joke!, but I think the budget it was probably like under a
hundred for Forbidden Places.Like I said, we didn’t waste any time.We did it at Capitol, which was probably
expensive, but I don’t think it probably cost more than fifty, something like
that.I don’t know.I wasn’t keeping track of it at that
point.I was looking at it like, “It’s
not really my money.They’re paying to
have this record made,” and I didn’t really care.

M- So the historical circumstances of Forbidden Places, of course, is that it came out just two months
before Nevermind came out.I’ve seen interviews where you say that
everyone was happy with Forbidden Places,
but it didn’t sell very well did it?

C- No.It pretty much tanked,
and just got ignored in the whole whirlwind of the Seattle thing. It wasn’t stylistically within the trend.We made something that was pretty unique to
us.To me it was more of like an Up on the Sun kind of record, a listener’s
record.Something you want to put
headphones on to, and get into the details.And it was completely overshadowed by the trend, which wasn’t just
us.It was like, you had all those hair
metal bands, Guns ‘n’ Roses was huge, so there was the hard rock scene and then
all of a sudden there was this new kind of hard rock which made dinosaurs out
of just about everybody that was signed, that wasn’t wearing a punk rock sort
of look and playing a little more aggressively.Suddenly this is the new thing, grunge or alternative.I don’t know that that record got really
taken in that way.It was basically no
more successful than anything we had ever done on the indie.There’s probably some resentment there from
some of it because we were so indie, and then people are like, “Oh, there’s
this nice pop record.” I don’t know, it just
didn’t make any waves.

M- There were all these other bands, whether it’s Sonic Youth or
Hüsker Dü or whoever, and then all of a sudden there’s Nirvana and there’s a
new way of looking at the whole thing.You guys were not Nirvana, yet.

C- Well, we were never anybody.I don’t care how much money was involved at that point.Everybody else did.They were like, “You’re not Nirvana.Why can’t you sell out these. . .”We were on tour a couple of days behind
Nirvana, sometimes just one day, same clubs, on that Forbidden Places tour, in the fall of that year.Club owners would straight up say stuff like
that, “Oh Nirvana sold out.What’s wrong
here?”It’s a little different really, if
you look at it.We had been involved in
this and that and we had done shows with a lot of different kinds of bands and
a lot of different kinds of music.It’s
just not that.Forbidden
Places was probably our sixth record at the time, something like that.I’ve always focused on my own thing.I’ve never liked scenes.I can’t say, “Oh I like all the bands in that
scene, or I get that scene.”It’s beyond
me, just too self involved.

M- In what ways did the record label start talking to you differently
after Nirvana and as you start thinking about Too High to Die and what songs you’re going to put on there?

C- Well the first record, Forbidden
Places, not doing too good definitely put us on the back burner of the
label.They were like, “Maybe we’ll put
out an EP of some of your older stuff done acoustically.”Which was ironic.“We’ll put it out on our indie imprint there
at London, and not spend any money.”They
didn’t know what to do.We had just
spent money on this and they didn’t want to go ahead and make a whole other
record.So we went to Memphis, their
studio that they had a deal with there, the Warehouse.It was an old cotton warehouse, and a cool
place.The Bar-Kays were in there.It was fun listening to them.I always loved them.We started recording and we did “Lake of
Fire” and we did “Plateau”.That would
have been in the Spring of ’93 probably.We were, “Okay, that’s what that is.This is what they’re giving us.”I thought it was a pretty cool idea to do these acoustic things, and
they wound up later that year getting recorded by Nirvana, and they didn’t have
any idea we were doing acoustic versions of those things.So maybe there was something to the record
label’s thing.But in the midst of the
session we pulled out some punk rock songs, some old Phoenix punk rock just for
fun.We were like, “Yeah ok, we made
these acoustic things.Let’s blast
that.”We did The Feederz “Fuck You”
song. That was over the top, and that
was another fluke.We played that for
them, you know, we sent them the acoustic things, and we played that and they
were like, “Holy shit!That’s awesome!Make a record.”

M- Make a record like that.

C- Yeah, they heard the loud punk rock and saw that Paul had made it
sound really big and cool.

M- So Paul was in there for the acoustic stuff?

C- Yeah.I got him to get
involved.He hadn’t really produced too
much at the time.He had done the Bad
Livers, Delusions of Banjer, which I
really liked.I loved the Bad Livers,
just amazing banjo playing.Danny Barnes
is the guy’s name.He’s an amazing banjo
player, guitar player.Paul had done
that and I was like, “That sounds great.That would be awesome for this acoustic thing.”And Paul and I were friends, and they said,
“Oh cool.”They thought it made sense,
so we were in there on the cheap doing that.

M- Was he the only one considered?

C- With that?No.We tried a few other things for sure.We did some tracks with Tom Werman.We had acquired a manager at that point, you
know, sometime after Forbidden Places,
or in the midst of it or something, and he knew Tom Werman, our manager Jamie
Kitman.He managed They Might Be Giants
and Beautiful South and some other stuff.He knew Tom Werman from, I think he used to mow his lawn or something
when he was a kid.I thought that was a
cool idea.I love those Ted Nugent
things that he did, and Dream Police
was bitchen.Tom has done some cool
stuff, and he did some Motley Crew stuff.It was like, “Oh this will be a hoot.”It’s still that way.I don’t know
who would produce, you know?Producers
oftentimes jump boundaries all over the place, and it’s more the idea that I’m
not trying to make a record that sounds like Motley Crew, just going, “Well
let’s see how this interfaces with our trip.”So we did some tracks.I think we
did “Things” and we did a song called “Animal,” which didn’t make Too High to Die, but it made a couple of
movies.It was one of the outtakes.So we did that one and “Things” with Tom,
maybe one more.It was pretty cool.It didn’t really pan out.The record company didn’t like it.I don’t think it was their idea really. They had tossed us the money for that.That was before we had Paul in there.That’d probably be late ’92.Paul, like I said, came in through the
acoustic thing.He didn’t really have
any ideas about making a big record.Paul really liked Forbidden Places
and I think we all considered that to be, like I said, it was an
education.He wasn’t there but he knew
the band and when he heard Forbidden
Places he realized what Pete had done, and he kind of shored up all his
production thoughts real fast at that point.I think it influenced him heavily, like, you can be this meticulous, and
seeing us filtered through that.I think
it made him meticulous.We learned a lot
from Pete in terms of the process of getting stuff to sound good without making
it flat or taking the life out of it.Focus
in on the record with a microscope.But I
helped out a lot just by going, “Well here’s how Pete did it.”

“Well how do you do this?”

“Well, check it out.Here’s how we did it.”

M- So they get the “Fuck You” song and decide you can go ahead and do
a full on rock ‘n’ roll record?

C-Yep.It was pretty awesome because we had to leave
at that point and do a tour with Soul Asylum.We left Memphis and went out for a few weeks with those guys, and they
were just starting to get huge off that Grave
Dancers thing.Then we went back to
Memphis right after that and started in on it.

M- How was it different from recording Forbidden Places?

C- Well, it was a more laid-back environment, being in Memphis.We still put in the hours for sure.We worked long days.In a lot of ways it wasn’t that
different.Paul and Stuart Sullivan
toted like a dozen of Paul’s amps out there.He brought a huge collection of cool stuff out to Memphis and had it all
set up.It was like we did with Forbidden Places.It’s just we weren’t in there, you know, not
in Hollywood.We were able to inhabit
the place a little bit more.I wasn’t
uncomfortable at Capitol, I was just minding my own business cuz there’s, in
the other room there’s Donna Summer.At
one point Steven Seagal showed up with Kelly LeBrock, and across the hall was
Etta James.It was pretty crazy like
that.And then go to Memphis and there
was more rap, the Bar-Kays were in one room.In the others were local dudes, rappers, like Al Kapone and his posse,
Skinny Pimp, and 211. We would play
basketball with these guys, play a lot of ping pong, lots of basketball because
they have basketball inside.It was an
old cotton warehouse so the main area was this warehouse, and then the
partitioned off studio spaces, but the main area was vast so you could play
basketball in there.It was right on the
banks of the Mississippi, up on a bluff.Nothing too fancy but very adequate.Paul brought Stuart Sullivan out.That’s how we met Stuart.He was
like, “This guy’ll be cool.You’ll like
him.”Pete and I became friends and Pete
was real friendly with all of us, and we liked the engineer for Forbidden Places, Peter Doell, and Dusty
Wakeman is an awesome guy, the Assistant Producer.But Paul is an old friend, by this time we’d
known each other for ten years.We were
let go out there with the budget, and that was the first time for us.It’s like, “Oh major label budget,” and for
Paul, too.So we had to be careful and
not look like we were wasting time, but it was also like you have to suddenly
realize, “Oh, they’ve given us this responsibility so let’s take it.”And they’d come out.We’d listen to them, but we also pretty much
put on the hat right away like, “We’re producing this.”I have to say, the A&R person Lori Harbough
was really cool and always sympathetic, but she definitely wasn’t going to try
to sell out her people at the label either, kind of a median that you have to
reach.But it wasn’t hard.We were getting good results.It was a little more organic in the long run
too, because whereas I wouldn’t do it with Pete, with Paul I could tell him
what I thought.This was a coproduction
at this point.If you know the producer
well enough it means your opinions might carry a little more weight.The record company helped set-up all the
accommodations.It wasn’t much of a job
to produce for any of us, except just to be there and make the record.They housed us in a nice place.Everything was pretty much set, but it was
like kids in a candy store, cuz we were left to our own devices, you know,
starting to get the experience of when to know what would work with these
people.Because basically on the major,
like I said, it was something I hadn’t experienced. They would go, “No I don’t like this.We’re not putting this out,” which SST never
would have done.

M- At what point did you think that London was going to start pushing
this record?

C- There was a radio guy at Universal London named Sky Daniels, been
around for a while.He was into the song
“Nail it Down” that was on Forbidden
Places.Pete had flown with that one
as a potential single and got Tommy Funderburk to come in and sing the
background vocals to make it all pro—Tommy had done background stuff on all
kinds of different stuff, he’s one of those ringers—got the organ on it and
stuff with those studio cats.Sky
Daniels was into it and he’s going, “Man that’s almost there.If you can do it like that on the next
record. . .You’re getting there.You almost got something there that I can do.”And then I saw, “Oh, it’s like that.They pick a song like that.”So when they first started hearing
“Backwater” he was like, “Yeah, that’s it.That’s a thing.”That started
spreading a little bit, like, “Yeah, ‘Backwater’.”That’s when our manager was like, “Oh, that’s
radio ready.”

M- Was this off a demo at this point, that they’re hearing “Backwater?”

C- Uhm, no, the roughs that we had made in Memphis.Actually it might have been mixed by that
point.But definitely it was like, “Okay,
you gave us something we can work at radio.”Then a few things happened.We
played the WaveFest out in South Carolina, and we headlined on that with like Hootie
and the Blowfish opening.It’s a little
festival.Really more like seventy or
eighty-thousand people.They had a
market cornered down there.We had
played it once before and this time we got to headline it.Somehow the record company got people who
were like independent radio consultant types to come down.And here’s where you start seeing how the in-house
thing works.They outsource these people
who have a reputation.They get
paid.They go back with their
endorsements to radio stations and go, “Yep.You should push this song.”They
get paid for each station that adds it, and they make a lot of money.They came to that show and we blew it out so
they hopped on to endorse what we were doing.That was a big thing.Then we did
the Unplugged thing.It was like, “Oh wow! Nirvana likes them.”They had already solicited a testimonial from
Cobain and from Dave Pirner to put on the cover.I think that’s the only time I ever said
anything.I was like, “Oh really.That’s so cheesy.”

And they were like, “No.It’s just respect and don’t tell us how to do
our business.”

And I was like, “Oh I get you.You’re trying to sell it.”

All these things started adding up.You could at that point say “Nirvana” and it
would turn heads.We had the consultants
on board and the promoters, and then everybody at the record company in their
kind of herd-like fashion was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.It’s ok to go over here.The herd is going over here.You don’t want to be stuck out there by
yourself.”So by the time it came out
January ’94 everybody was pretty into it.

M- There are some other things that smack of marketing as well. It’s the only record you’ve ever done, even to
this day, where the cover is a photo of you.

C- Yeah.They spent an arm and
a leg on that session.

M- So is this something the label said, “We don’t want one of your
pieces of art?”

C- I imagine so.Yeah, I think
so.They have design people.They have the art department there and you start
getting in with those people.I don’t
think they knew exactly what they wanted, but I didn’t really mind because I
was glad the record was coming out, and they let us pick the photo.It was interesting because we spent a lot of
money.We spent probably a week shooting
all around Phoenix and then went up to Sedona.It was definitely a whole shit load of pictures taken and some really
cool stuff.

C- Yeah, Halsband was like a big GQ guy buddy of Calvin Klein, mostly
fashion stuff, a really cool photographer, a fun guy.Wound up working with him more a little bit
after that here and there.Halsband.He shot Eyes Adrift later,
too.But I think it was his idea.He brought all kinds of stuff, you know?

M- So there are a lot of people involved in these major label releases.

C- Yeah, and you can’t just have your A&R person into it, they
have to get on board at radio and distribution and promotion, all these
different departments have to somehow magically meet, and they don’t do that on
their own necessarily.There’s no
coordinator.Your manager has to be in
there rooting for you and trying to coalesce and then somehow it just kind of
does.And there were flukes involved
with us.They didn’t really have to
spend as much money because we had built-in promotional stuff going on with the
Nirvana thing, and that really helped them.They were all happy about that because it went gold without them even
trying, and I think they were satisfied.In a lot of ways it was good and bad.They never really pushed it that much because it did so well on its own,
and then we went out with Stone Temple Pilots.And I think they thought that was going to bump it up even more cuz we
had been having so much of this flukey promotion and good fortune that
way.But by the mid-Summer it started to
lose the wind, it went gold pretty handily, and then it just kinda kept selling
a little bit.It’s like, “We didn’t have
to put anything into this and it still did this good.”

“Well imagine if you had put something into it.”

M- And Cobain kills himself not too long after you release it.

C- It’s not the greatest promotion, that.That was like, “Okay, people know who we
are.Oh, they’re going to put out the Unplugged record.”But it was also sad and it’s something you don’t
want to tie your thing to that too much.So, I mean, I got it all.I never
had any feelings really one way or the other how they should do it.It was unfathomable that they can get
everything working and they get the regional guys working and the whole thing
and it becomes part of their focus and then pretty soon you’re on their
agenda.By the time we decided to start
doing No Joke! everybody at the
company knew who we were, and we had done so well with that that they gave us a
huge budget and we became the focus of their Fall release thing, us and Warren G.

M- So, Too High to Die,
would you agree it’s a heavier record than Forbidden
Places?At least in the production.

C- Yeah.There’s louder
guitars on it for sure.It’s more
Marshall.It’s my own rig largely.And then you know Paul had some cool little
amps, older Marshalls and this and that, but the go to thing on that was
definitely my rig and my live sound.I
was doing the stuff that I’d learned and the stuff that I was seeing in like,
“Oh here’s alternative production.”It’s
basically AC/DC you know?You got a
guitar on the right, a guitar on the left, you know, make ‘em kind of
loud.

M- So you were thinking about that when you just said this is “alternative
production?”

C- Yeah.I could see, “There’s
how they do that.”You layer these
rhythm guitars, you know, not too many of them but definitely kind of pillar
them on each side and make the drums and bass heavy.Pretty simple stuff really.Putting a rhythm here, and here’s your lead,
kind of identical tracks, and splitting them for the rhythms and making it loud.I just made it a heavier rock album.It reminded me of Huevos a little bit in that way.Another Marshall heavy album.

M- But with bigger production.

C- Yeah.

M- So, again, you were consciously thinking about making a record
that sounded like an alternative rock record?

C- Uhm.

M- As a marketing strategy?

C- I was definitely aware of what was being played.And what could I do that wouldn’t hurt my
feelings to make that happen.I’ve
always been flexible.It’s just one
thing or another, you know?Everything
has been inspired by something that way, something somebody else did, to a
certain degree.You come across stuff in
the studio, but all this shit’s been done over and over again.It wasn’t as much any of the alternative bands.I saw how those productions were mirroring the
basic setup that AC/DC had done, or Deep Purple sort of stuff, seventies rock
that we heard on the radio a lot.And I
was just like, “That’ll be cool.That’ll
work with this stuff.”

M- And so were all the songs written like Forbidden Places?When you
went into the studio were they set and ready to go?

C- Yeah for sure.The demos
for Too High to Die we did in
Phoenix.We called it the Protecto
sessions because they had Protecto toilet seat covers in the bathroom.We thought it was hilarious.We did it at some place there.I forget the name of it, but they were really
cool.It was a little bit like Up on the Sun again having a
template.It was basically that same
record, but just kind of blown out a little more.But, yeah, the stuff was all done.

M- And finally lyrically, especially on Too High to Die, it seems like a lot of the lyrics are concerning
some of the things that we’ve been talking about right here, about dealing with
the major labels, maybe frustrations.

C- I would definitely say that kind of bleeds into it.I don’t know that I would be that overt about
it.

M- For instance, “Comin’ Down”, it’s a traditional bluegrass kind of
thing but it can be read as, “We’ve been down, now were up with the major label,
it’s not as great as everybody says and I might come back down again.”

C- Well there’s something that you can lay over anything “Comin’
Down” is bluegrass gospel sort of stuff.It’s oblique.

M- Or “Roof with a Hole,” “everything gets ruined by” what?By money?

C- Yeah that for sure, or just, you know, that’s another kind of
typical one that way, gospelly sort of blues.So is “Backwater” really.I think
“Comin’ Down” was inspired by a Che Guevara quote.I think that’s who said “one ascends, one has
seen.One descends, one has seen,” some
sort of thing that I thought was kind of funny.It’s just like you can’t stay up there, that type of thing.

You know, once again it’s pretty of hard to
intentionally do stuff. I’ve been
writing since November here.And the
lyrics are definitely the real kicker.If
you think about it it just fucks it all up.You think about it and get nowhere and then stuff just kind of comes
up.It comes and it’s not something that
you try to do.Not me anyway.

M- So you’d agree though that, even if you don’t think about it too
hard, these experiences are working their way in?

C- Oh yeah.I count on
that.It’s not like I’m a shut in. Lewis Carroll wasn’t either.I look at Lewis Carroll, there’s things that
he’s talking about.Just like Michelangelo
painted satirical shit into the Sistine Chapel.If you know what to look for you can see it.And that stuff for sure comes out in what I
do.I try not to point fingers too
much.I try not to be specific.I don’t like to have it be dated or that easy
to pin down.It’s also just cuz I’m not
very good at writing a story, like a Bob Dylan “This is the story of Hurricane.”I didn’t start writing until this band was
happening.I only wrote stuff so we
could have things to sing.Basically
we’re musicians and enjoyed the process of playing music and hearing singing as
another instrument.And if you can have
something to throw your emotions behind, something you can relate to, that’s one
thing. But we’ve never really played much
like that.The producers are like, “Do
that track again, and this time put some emotion into it.”You know?Like, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”